Gehry’s Plans Call for a Hidden Headquarters

Facebook’s new headquarters will be located across the street from its current digs in Menlo Park, Calif., and connected to the old campus by a tunnel.

While there is evidence of the sharply angular slants and sinewy curves for which the architect is known, the low-slung building has a comparably low-profile from the road.

Partially disguised by a rooftop park across the 433,555-square-foot building, Gehry was reportedly asked to design an anonymous-looking structure.

Even though it will be 45 feet tall and even rising to 73 feet in some areas, the square footage mostly will be taken up by its length, which will be filled with some 2,800 Facebook engineers.

It won’t just blend in with nature. Although green roofs like this one require substantial engineering for the weight of earth and plants, they work to reduce heating and cooling costs.

This aerial view of a model of the proposed building shows a twisting floor plan boxed in by angled walls and curving pedestrian byways.

It seems suitable that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose Gehry—one of the most distinctive and well-known architects in the world today. His Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, shown above, is a modern icon.

Gehry’s EMP Museum in Seattle was disparaged for its bizarre massing and strange colors, with one architecture critic likening it to something that crawled out of the sea and died.

The Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., is a more familiar Gehry design but also came under fire for leaky roofs and poor build quality.

The Facebook HQ is likely to recall Gehry’s DB Bank building (center) in Berlin, where an austere exterior belies the architect’s more flamboyant tastes inside.